For some reason, his honest admission choked me up. I shouldn’t be jealous because he’s dead. Suddenly, my chest tightened and my eyes felt a little tingly. I couldn’t put my finger on why—was it the reminder that Brock was dead, or was it something more?
Maybe it was William’s heartfelt confession that he didn’t even realize he’d confessed to. Sometimes he was so innocent that it pierced me to the core.
I leaned toward him despite his agitation, and, rising on tiptoes, I ran my fingers through his thick, dark hair, right where he’d done the same thing just moments ago. His eyes fluttered closed and his hands relaxed. “Wil, can I help you? Will you let me?”
“Just how do you think you can help me?” he asked quietly, without looking at me.
“Maybe by talking about it? We all have parent issues. I promise you. Yours might be more difficult because your mom has passed away and you can’t talk to her.”
“If she were alive, I’d have nothing to say to her. I never talked to her much.”
“How old were you when she and your dad divorced?”
“Five.” His voice held no emotion whatsoever. He really did sound like a robot, even though he’d claimed that he wasn’t.
“And you and your sister lived with your dad when they separated?”
“Yes.”
One word answers…hmm. It was going to take a while to get it out of him at this pace. I gave a slight push against his hard, thick arm, cueing for him to face me. “Wil, tell me about it. What was it like? Were you glad you were living with your dad instead of her?”
His face was as blank as his voice. A defense mechanism, maybe? “That was never an option. She left. She made it clear she didn’t want to have a relationship with me.”
I squinted, confused. “But your sister…”
“Oh, she saw Britt all the time. Every week. My mother even asked her to live with her when Britt turned thirteen, but Britt said no. I think my sister always felt bad for me and didn’t want to leave me.” He shrugged. “I told her she should go if she wanted. I love my dad and I was glad to stay with him.”
I smiled. “Your dad is a pretty awesome guy.”
His jaw clenched and then released. “Yes. He deserved better than he got.” He shook his head.
“You mean your mom didn’t treat him well?”
“I’m sure they were happy together once, maybe before I was born or before I got to be a handful.”
Ah, now we were getting somewhere. “Wait, you don’t believe you’re the reason they got divorced, do you?”
He turned away from me slightly, directing his words at the wall. “It’s a statistically proven fact that the parents of autistic children are more susceptible to divorce.” I bit my lip, trying to think of what to say in response, but he kept talking. “Not that the divorce rate in the United States is all that great anyway, but it’s higher among couples with children on the spectrum.”
“So that’s why you think they divorced? Because of some statistic? Wil—some people just freak out and can’t handle parenthood, or even just being married in general.”
He turned back toward me but still didn’t look at me. “Her second marriage was just fine. She remarried less than a year after she left us and stayed married until she died.”
“Well, then fuck her. That’s her problem, not yours. You do not ever blame yourself for that. What kind of person abandons her children?”
“She didn’t abandon us—”
I stepped up to him and took his arm in my hand again. I wanted to shake him—to show him how wrong and harmful his thinking really was. “Wil, she abandoned you. Maybe not your sister, but she did abandon you. She never realized or cared how much it would hurt you to favor your sister over you.”
He swallowed but kept silent, looking over my shoulder. I put my hands on his cheeks. He jerked his head away.
“Not my face…”
“Okay.” I moved my hands to his shoulders, pressing hard. “You are worthy of love. And you were worthy of her love. And the fact that she could not give it to you was her failing, not yours.”
William licked his lips, and after a long stretch of seconds, his dark eyes finally met mine. I wanted to take him in my arms, hold him, kiss him, comfort him, but I had no idea if that was what he really needed from me right now. I needed to, but his needs in this moment were far more important.
His head fell forward slightly and his forehead touched mine. I could feel his warm breath float over my face as we stood there, silent. When I looked at his eyes again, they were closed, his long dark lashes lying calmly against his cheeks.
“You know what we should do?” I said in a small voice. He’d have never heard me had it not been so quiet here in the back of the house.
“What?” he asked without opening his eyes.
“We should open up those cards. We should read them and see what they say.”
His eyelids snapped open. He looked almost sick at the idea, and slowly, he moved his forehead away from mine. “I don’t want to do that.”
“Why?”
“Because…because I’d rather imagine what I want them to say.”
“And what is it that you’d want them to say?”
“I’d like to imagine that she was sorry. That every card was an apology that I had a chance to accept and didn’t.”
“Would that make you feel any differently about her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can we find out?”
He was quiet again for a long time.
I turned and walked over to the drawer, gingerly sliding it open, giving him the chance to protest. He said nothing, so I fished out the cards—there were sixteen of them. I began to arrange the various colored envelopes in order of oldest postmark date to the newest, all stamped in the month of October. The first one was dated 1994. He’d been six years old.
“When’s your birthday?”
“October fourteenth,” he intoned flatly as he watched me arrange the cards.
“Ah, a Libra. That makes sense. Passionate, artistic, gentle and sensitive.”
“None of that astrology stuff makes any sense,” he responded.
“Okay, whatever. Here’s the one for your sixth birthday,” I said, holding the sunny yellow envelope out to him. “Do you want to open it?”